Famo Adventure Motorcycling Guide

Imagine you’ve lived in your small, dusty desert city all of your life, taking out the trash, shopping at the markets, maybe running a small camel butchery. Two kilometres from the town centre there sits the old town, a citadel, a majestic arg built 2500 years ago by your great ancestors. The citadel was the original incarnation of your modern town, consisting of a massive fortress overlooking the maze of rabbit-warrens and dens that comprised the living quarters and workplaces of the people.

The foundations of your modernized city were laid not many more than 150 years ago. Contrast this with the arg that was home to the people in your area for over two thousand years; offering more civilized shelter and many more trade opportunities than a standard caravan serai, it also played an important role in the lives of merchants and travellers as they passed along the ancient Silk Road route towards whatever their fortune may have been.

Today, both the ancient and modern cities of Bam look like war-ravaged places in the throes of being rebuilt. On the 26th of December 2003 an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale flattened 70% of the modern city and killed 52,000 people. The destruction caused by the earthquake is still being overcome four years later; however it seems unlikely that the efforts to restore the old city will ever return it to its past glory.

Destruction of the Citadel “Arg e Bam”

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As I made my way out of the deserts and fuel uncertainties of Sistan and Baluchestan and passed into the outskirts of Bam, it’s date-palms blowing in the lazy desert winds, I set my heart on finding the guesthouse that I’d been hearing about over the past couple of weeks from sand-battered, east-bound travelers. It was on my mind that I wanted to meet the man in charge, Akbar, to see what kind of stories he had to tell. After realising the roads on the map bore very minor resemblance to the actual town layout, I pulled over to ask a local man where Akbar’s guesthouse was and he replied with a jovial “Akbar is is here, I am Akbar, pleased to meet you, would you like a room?” In some mysterious way it felt like he knew I would arrive at that time, as though a magical desert wind carried news to him of the approach of a strange-looking traveler on a ridiculous motorcycle. Mystical tales aside though, I suppose if your house is a rest stop for travelers in the desert, you spend a lot of time standing outside waiting for people to come along.

Akbar was very friendly, somewhat quirky and thoughtful. He has seen a lot in his lifetime, including the destruction of his guesthouse and the death of some people very close to him. Nevertheless, his positive outlook on life breaks through and you start to believe that it will only be a year before the whole town is rebuilt and everything is back to normal. There are big plans for a new three-storey guesthouse on the land next to the current establishment, and it appears that new techniques are being implemented to ensure the structure will withstand earthquakes; something that Akbar asserted was of the utmost importance. His attitude towards the old citadel of Bam was sad, but hopeful that the team rebuilding the site will have some success with the project, considering the tiny amount of architectural documentation they have to work with.

I stayed in Bam for a few nights and worked on coming to grips with the modernity and downright normality of Iranian people and their lifestyle. I’d walk into town, sit down at a local kebab place, have a great dinner and walk home past the ice-cream stalls. It was hard to imagine I was in the middle of a Persian desert. Unfortunately though, after a few days I had to pack up and leave my little oasis of Bam. Next stop, Shiraz, for some authentic Iranian wine!

My first night in Iran was spent sleeping off the day’s hair-raising activities in my very neat hotel room. It’s hard to describe how welcome a hot shower is after weeks under the cold tap, but rest-assured I gave myself a good scrubbing and came out looking like… a traveller.

The next morning broke with sunshine and the realisation that I’d have to get on my bike again and ride off into the desert towards Bam. I packed up and went for a walk into town, pretty much putting off the inevitable business of riding for as long as possible, until my checkout time came and I had to grab my bike and go. As I was leaving town, I decided to stop for lunch at a local kebab shop, and went in to make an attempt at ordering, to the amusement of the kid behind the counter. I ended up with about 5 pieces of bread and three kebab sticks, two whole tomatoes and a plate of onion. Sound. Just as I was about to pay, a young guy in a shalwar kameez came in and offered to pay for my food. I said no about ten times and eventually gave in. It turns out he was an army guy on a break from his duties.

He said it was stupid to try and ride to Bam at midday and that I should stay at his place tonight and he’d get some mates around for a party. We ended up cruising around town for a couple of hours, then went back to the flat and listened to music and chatted about the differences between what we see on the news in the west and the real Iran. It was a good night and his mates were all hilarious. They spoke about how many girlfriends they had and taught me a couple of pickup lines in Farsi, like “salaam kosh kele” means hey beautiful!

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This fella was a crackup, I’m not sure where they learn these moves.

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My friend ready for work and me looking worse for wear. Time to get riding!

Zahedan to Bam

Wow, did I underestimate the difficulty of this stretch of road or what? It cuts through a desert called the Dash-e Lut, a 480km by 320km expanse of nothing, pretty much abiotic (no life) and boasts record surface temperatures of up to 71 degrees celsius… That’s seriously hot! It’s sandy, full of massive ergs (huge, wind-blown dunes) and liable to swallow you up in a sinkhole or underground trench if you feel the need to explore it. Luckily enough they built a nice tar road all the way through to Bam…

The general feeling when riding through a desert like the Dasht-e Lut is that if anything goes wrong, and you get stuck there, you’ll last maybe a day in the sun without water (sorry, no shade provided). Riding seems to feel like you’re heading straight into a salon-grade hairdryer, sans diffuser, with no rest-stops or petrol stations along the way. I hit a couple of sandstorms, the shearing gusts dropping, hitting then dropping away again, making a nightmare out of trying to keep the bike up. I stopped twice, got off and crouched down behind it until the sand stopped stinging.

The first incident on this stretch occurred about 30km after the desert section. I came across an oasis across the road from an army base, the wildlife consisting of a few date palms and a French cyclist stretched out beneath, looking very overheated. He’d ridden from Bam early that morning and made it to the only piece of shade. I happily gave him most of the food my mates in Zahedan had packed for me and half of the water I was carrying, not so risky because I only had 100km further to get to shelter and a shop. He told me that someone from the army barracks had come out and given him a bottle of water when they saw him arrive, for which he was very grateful. He asked me what the conditions of the stretch I’d just ridden were like and I shook my head and looked at him. The only advice I had, and it was left-over from the UK cyclist, Craig Foster, who I traveled with in outback Australia, was to do it in two goes of 50km each, one starting at about 7pm and another at 4am. He wouldn’t want to have been stuck there during the day without any trees. I rode on hoping he’d make it through alive and suddenly wishing I’d given him more water.

The second incident was a very close call. I hit reserve without a town, or a sign to a town in sight. I had a vague hunch that it was about another 20km to the first village. I freaked out because my reserve-tap range is only 23km. For anyone who doesn’t know how it works, there’s a tap on the side of the bike that you turn to “on” when you fill the bike up with petrol. When you run out of petrol, you switch the tap to “reserve” and then you know there’s maybe about 4 litres left in the tank to get you to a petrol station, kind of like a very primitive fuel gauge that doesn’t really inspire much confidence when you hit the warning level in the Iranian desert. I stopped a couple of times in high head-wind conditions to ensure the bike didn’t labor and use up too much precious fuel. I kept my speed to an average of about 60km/h and kept my eyes peeled for a town on the horizon.

The thing with mirages is this: it doesn’t look like anything specific really, it just looks like it might be something, maybe a group of houses way off in the distance and to the left, then as you approach it you veer off to the right and realise it was nothing, or a rocky hill… You add your hope to the hills and your mind sees a Co-op!

24km later, nothing in sight, fearing the worst, wondering how far I could push it if it ran dry, I crested a bend and rode straight into a village. Yaaay for organisation I was so keen to get petrol I asked a man to take me to the station immediately, but he laughed and indicated that I needed to relax, so I went into the little shop, bought a drink and had a great chat with the young kid in there, who kept saying Mark Bosnich to me and laughing and then introduced me to his even younger apprentice, who he called a monkey and delegated the duties of monkey noises to. The younger child gladly obliged and ran around the shop like a monkey until they both collapsed with laughter. By that time I had cooled down so I went and filled up the tank, thanked the monkey boys with a “ah, but mark viduka…” and rode to Bam.

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On to Bam!!